Well Read Column by Robert Weibezahl

Janet Malcolm courts controversy with honesty. The New Yorker writer has had infamous, high-profile legal tangles with at least two of her subjects: former Freud Archives director Jeffrey Masson and true-crime writer Joe McGinniss. Malcolm immerses herself into researching her stories, sometimes spending years with the person she is profiling. When she finally sits down to write about them, she...

Well Read Column by Robert Weibezahl

Most collections of literary letters are published posthumously and, more often than not, include just the one-sided narrative of a single writer. So, Here and Now: Letters, 2008-2011 is doubly notable: a three-year correspondence between two living writers—Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee and acclaimed American novelist Paul Auster. Soon after the two men met in 2008, Coetzee proposed that...

Well Read Column by Robert Weibezahl

When Mary Shelley published Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in 1818, it immediately captured the public’s attention. Two centuries later it remains a canonical work, despite—or perhaps because of—numerous Hollywood bowdlerizations that often have relegated a serious, philosophical novel to the realm of horror or even kitsch. Roseanne Montillo restores some of the...

Well Read Column by Robert Weibezahl

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of such notable books as Among Schoolchildren and The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder is one of our finest writers of narrative nonfiction. That was not always the case. As he tells us in Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, whatever raw talent he possessed at the start was honed under the exacting guidance of his longtime editor, Richard Todd. Their...

Feature by Martin Brady

History, football, humor, architecture, hunting—all are subjects that fit into the general scope of gifts for guys. This year’s picks offer a bounty of visual fare (men are visual, right?), but informative texts are also a big part of the picture.Kicking off the coverage is The Pro Football Hall of Fame 50th Anniversary Book. This handsomely produced tribute to the history of...

Feature by Julie Hale

Literature lovers have cause to rejoice this holiday season, with riches aplenty in the way of new releases. Need a gift that will impress your favorite bibliophile? Here’s your cheat sheet for holiday shopping!Since its debut in 1953, The Paris Review has served as a platform for outstanding fiction. A terrific new collection pairs gems from the journal’s archives with expert...

Feature by Alice Cary

Surround yourself with the creative vision on display in a variety of new art books. Curl up with essays likely to change or challenge your outlook, or dip into survey books for old favorites and new discoveries. As photographer Elliott Erwitt explains, “It’s about reacting to what you see, hopefully without preconception.”Start with a new edition of The Art Book, a massive...

Well Read Column by Robert Weibezahl

Reading Kurt Vonnegut’s newly published Letters, it is nearly impossible to progress more than a page or two without pausing again to admire another wry observation or nod in agreement with some pithy aphorism. It is abundantly apparent even in his casual writing that Vonnegut, who would be celebrating his 90th birthday on November 11, was a writer of sharp intelligence and inventive wit....

Well Read Column by Robert Weibezahl

The Coen brothers’ remake of True Grit helped bring Charles Portis’ 1968 novel back to bestseller lists, reminding readers what a gem of a book it is. The somewhat reclusive Arkansas writer had been off the literary radar for a while—his last novel, Gringos, published in 1991, was only his fifth since his 1966 debut, Norwood. That lack of productivity must be the culprit...

Book Clubs Column by Julie Hale

Leah Hager Cohen’s poignant fourth novel, The Grief of Others, follows a married couple as they try to move forward in the wake of tragedy. When their infant son dies, John and Ricky Ryrie struggle to regain their footing. Shifting into denial mode, they return to the business of daily living, which includes caring for their other two children, Biscuit, 10, and Paul, 13. As life resumes,...